


Starker Short Stories

by greenteeth



Series: Run up to NaNoWriMo [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Afterlife, Death!Peter, Fix-It, Fluff, Halloween Costumes, Halloween Town (Nightmare Before Christmas), Humor, Infinity Gems, M/M, Nightmare Before Christmas References, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Peter is unnecessarily creepy, Post-Endgame, Precious Peter Parker, Sleepwalking, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26957572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenteeth/pseuds/greenteeth
Summary: A bunch of fluffy stories about Tony Stark and Peter Parker that aren't long enough to post separately.
Relationships: Peter Parker/Tony Stark
Series: Run up to NaNoWriMo [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1967191
Comments: 3
Kudos: 63





	1. Hunt and Peck

**Author's Note:**

> Most of these stories happen in a universe where the Avengers are a family or at least on speaking terms with each other.

“My life is a lie.” 

Tony looked up at Peter. “Could you be more specific, honey?” 

Peter gestured vaguely at where Tony was sitting in front of the computer. “My Life. It’s a lie.” 

“Ok.” Tony paused. “Is that a problem? We’ve talked about you going public before and you said you didn’t want that kind of publicity.” 

“I have been lied to.” 

Tony turned around to fully face him. Those words were never good for his health or relationships. “Honey?”

Peter was still looking at him, slack jawed. 

“Ok,” Tony held up two fingers. “One, I have not lied to you. Two I abjectly apologize for whatever I lied to you about.” 

Peter stepped forward and wrapped both hands around Tony’s fingers. The spider-bit related stickiness of Peter’s finger pads raised goosebumps as Peter rubbed their fingers together.   
“You can’t type.” 

Tony pouted but didn’t pull away from Peter’s warmth. “I can.” He jerked his head toward the keyboard. “I was just typing.” 

“With two fingers.” 

“Four, technically.” 

Peter laughed. “You never learned to touch type. What did you do before you had Jarvis?” 

“I had a secretary. She did all the typing.” 

Tony watched Peter blow out a breath like he always did when the sheer difference of their age and upbringing hit him again. Tony wrapped an arm around Peter’s hips wanting to ground him in what they had together now.

“Did you invent the holographic displays just so you won’t have to learn?” 

“No, but saying that, I did it to win a drunken bet doesn’t sound any better.” 

Peter snorted. “You never played the typing game with the cat or had a cardboard box over your hands so you couldn’t see the keys.” 

Peter slid his fingers along Tony’s ring finger, then his pinky. Tony caressed Peter’s hip trying to distract him. Peter’s gentle fingers couldn’t make the finger straighten completely, the joint too stubborn.   
Peter frowned. “What happened?” 

Tony shrugged. “Life.” Seeing Peter getting upset Tony continued. “I’m not the best at lab safety. Dad wasn’t either, come to think of it. I broke it three times before I was nine.” 

Peter turned his palm over seeking out the small scars and, Tony swallowed, imperfections a life of applied robots had left there. After an eternity Peter kissed the heel of his hand and let it drop.   
Peter grinned at him. “I still can’t believe the great Tony Stark has to hunt and peck at a keyboard.”


	2. Costume Bots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dummy wants Peter to pick his Halloween costume

Peter walked into Tony’s lab. He was aiming for a nice hello kiss. What he got was a peck on the cheek and Tony distractedly telling him to look at that. That was pretty usual. It warmed Peter that Tony asked his opinion so often. 

He went to the screen to have a look. There was a spider and a pumpkin and a dracula cape. “Tony, these are pet costumes.” 

“Yeah,” Tony answered distractedly and pointed back at the screen. 

“We don’t have a pet.” 

“They’re for Dummy. Well, I think Butterfingers and U want to join in this year too.” 

There was a chorus of chirps from the bots charging stations. 

“This year?”

“Dummy likes to dress up for Halloween and the kids that come to the SI Halloween party get a kick out of it.” 

“Please, tell me there are pictures.”

A series of sound beeps let Peter know that Friday had pulled them up on this screen. Peter clutched his chest. They were adorable. There was one of Dummy as a pirate. The bot had a hat with a skull and crossbones resting on his top joint, an oversized gold ‘earring’ attached to it and a plastic sword held in his claw. There was another of him with a witch’s hat, black cape and a broom. Another with black and yellow tape wrapped around his arm and gauzing wings. 

“He was a bee?” 

“Yep.” Tony looked at the picture too, smiling. 

“How did this start?” 

Tony looked a little embarrassed. “I threw a sheet over him after he ruined a toaster. He decided that meant he was dressed as a ghost and refused to give the sheet back until Thanksgiving.” 

Peter made a meh noise because of the cuteness of that story. 

“After that.” Tony shrugged. 

“What does he want to go as this year?” Peter asked. 

“He’s not sure. I think he and Butterfingers and U are trying to decide if they want to do a group costume or each do their own. He said you could choose for him.” 

“Really?” Peter looked over at Dummy who was doing something next to a disassembled car. “Thank you.” 

Peter flipped through a few pages of costumes. “Does he want to be a spider?” There were a bunch of costumes that gave Pets extra legs like a spider. 

Tony twitched. “No.” 

“Ok,” Peter looked back at the screen. “Wonder Woman?” 

Dummy chirped, U beeped and there was a flurry of sounds that meant the three bots were having a conversation. 

Tony closed his eyes and pressed a thumb next to his eye. 

Friday spoke. “U would like to be Superman. And Dummy and Butterfingers are arguing over whether Aqua-Man or the Flash is a better Superhero.” 

“Five years. Five years I’ve avoided superhero costumes.” Tony said, but without much heat. 

Peter laughed. “It could be worse. It could be Ba”

Tony covered Peter’s mouth with his hand. “We don’t say that word in this house.” 

Peter laughed some more.


	3. Death!Peter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony dies and finds death waiting for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this starts with Tony dying. He meets Peter as he enters the afterlife.

Tony stared at the sky. He knew he was dying. The blast had taken out most of his lung and he could feel his arc reactor stuttering as it went into emergency shutdown mode. He knew his friends were around him. He knew he had saved them. That while he would die here, they would live. The barren alien world swam in his vision. He could feel a line of blood leaking out of the corner of his mouth. He wheezed in a breath and knew it was his last. The orange landscape faded to gray. 

He breathed in. Color spread back into the world bringing with it a sharp focus. A sharper focus then he had had before the battle, maybe had in years. He rolled his head to the side smooth as a well oiled gear. The field was empty. He was alone on this vast plane. He turned his head to the other side. He looked at the sky again and frowned. He looked back to the side. If he had imagined the man, he was still imagining the man. 

“Hello?”

The man looked up from his phone. He was wearing black jeans and a black hoodie and battered black converse sneakers. “Oh, great, you’re here. Well maybe not great. I know a lot of people don’t think it’s great. And I guess for you it’s probably not great. Just I’ve been waiting a while. They weren’t very precise about the time so I’ve been hanging around for a bit.” 

Tony stared at the man then raised one finger, two fingers, three fingers.

“What’s not great?” He dropped a finger. “Who are they?” He dropped another finger. “And who the fuck are you?”

“Oh, I’m Peter.” The man held out his hand to shake. 

Tony grabbed it and used it to haul himself to his feet. “Peter?” Tony paused. “Like the saint?”

“What, no? Well a little bit maybe. He’s the one at the gates of heaven?” The man, Peter, frowned.

Tony shrugged. 

“I’m death.” 

“Peter was more believable.” 

“I’m a death.” Peter/Death pointed to a black crest embroidered on his black hoodie. “Mostly.” 

“Uh huh.” 

“Well, you know, most deaths are associated with Hades or Mercury but the fates got me the job and I kind of report to them instead.” 

Tony nodded. He hadn’t known any of that. “Just to clarify. I’m dead.”

“Yep.” The man nodded. “Sorry.” He added after a beat too long. 

“And you’re here to, what?” 

“Observe, and record your death then take you to the halls of fate.” 

“Observe? Is someone that invested in seeing me dead?” 

“No, yes, so, it’s one of those things.” The man explained. “It’s quantum, I guess. Someone had to observe to fix your death into the timeline. There were a bunch of times that the fates weren’t sure if you would live or die.” The man leaned a bit closer. “They don’t like that much.” 

“That…” Tony struggled for a moment. “Makes sense.” 

The man nodded. 

“So, what do we do now?” 

“We go to the halls of fate.” 

“Counter offer. We go to dinner.” 

Peter looked him up and down. Tony glanced down to see that he was still missing half his chest. 

“Clean up, fate, then dinner.” Peter bargained. 

“Lay on, McDuff.”


	4. Peter and Tony live in Halloween Town

“In this town, we call home everyone hail to the pumpkin song…” Tony leaned back in his arm chair letting the words wash over him. It was a month until Halloween and the choir practice was in full swing. Tony had been putting the final touches on his haunted house all day and was ready to crawl into his coffin for a well deserved nap. 

He was just waiting for Peter to wrap up, his lips twitched, whatever he was doing so he wouldn’t sleep alone. 

He let his eyes wander around the room. He had been going for subtle wrongness here. There was of course the torture chamber downstairs, and the endless hallway on the third floor, and the ominous ripples in the black pond as if something was waiting to surge out of the water and grab you. 

But here in the study he had gone with a more toned down approach. If someone took time to study the view out of both the dusty windows they would realize that reality was just the slightest bit out of sync between the two. Most of the books that lined the shelves had innocuous titles like ‘The Art and Science of Potato Farming’ or ‘Little Ann’s Adventures’. But if someone lingered they would find more sinister volumes like ‘The many uses of Wolfsbane’, and ‘Modern Butchery - an updated guide’. 

The liquor bottles in the cabinet were all hand labelled in fading ink and Tony wasn’t going to have any of that Poison or XXX in this room. No, here they would only be confusing if someone knew the stories, Ourang Medan 1947, and Gimlin 1967. Tony rolled his shoulders wondering if he had time for a quick glass of Dyatlov 1959 before Peter got back. 

Peter wasn’t a fan and wrinkled his nose adorably when he could smell it on Tony’s breath. A clicking on the windows told him he was too late. A fuzzy abdomen passed across one window, then a second before it should, it passed across the second window. Peter opened the window with a god awful screech and came in four legs first and four legs behind. “Hi dear, how was your day at work?” 

The dim light reflected beautifully off his eight marble like black eyes. “Pretty good. We got the whole north forest covered in cobwebs and Jessica really liked my idea to use webs under the pine trees near the snow.” 

“Everything on track for Halloween?” Tony asked like he did every night. 

Peter gave him a grumpy grin like he did every night. “Yep. We start webbing the town tomorrow.”


	5. The Zombie Apocalypse is Boring

“You know, I always thought the Zombie Apocalypse would be more dramatic.” Tony mused as he looked out the lobby window.

Peter cocked his head. “They don’t seem very aggressive.” The crowd of shambling people pawed at the glass, persistent but without force. “How long will it take them to get through the glass?”

“At this rate?” Tony snorted. “A couple centuries.” 

Peter raised an eyebrow.

“That’s triple reinforced glass. Bullet proof and can withstand, say a 5’8’ 165 lb, superhero hitting it feet first at fifty miles an hour.” 

Peter blushed. “Oh.”

“Honestly, I’m surprised that you haven’t broken through more windows.” 

“It freaks people out when I land on their windows. Except you.” 

“Would saying that you can land on my windows anytime be tacky?” 

Peter laughed. “I’m tacky enough to stick to a window.” 

“Guys, can we focus here.” Steve asked from the other side of the lobby. 

Tony mouthed ‘convex lense’ at Peter and they both giggled. 

“What are we going to do?” 

“Peter got the notes from the mad scientist.” Tony offered. 

“The compound is very photosensitive. It’ll start breaking down as soon as they’re” he nodded to the moaning mass outside “exposed to sunlight.”

“What about bringing in spotlights?” Steve asked. 

“JARVIS ran the numbers and it will be safer to have them all gradually exposed to light at the same time. And sunrise is in a couple hours.” 

“So we do nothing.” 

“Sorta. RIght now the compound is in a really localized area.” 

“How localized?” 

Tony grimaced. “Stark Tower and a block on either side.” 

“So we keep them contained.” Steve started nodding to himself. “Has someone talk to NYPD about setting up roadblocks?”

“Yep. They’ve got it under control.”

“When you called me down here I thought you had something for us. What’s left to do?” Steve asked. 

“Look at our audience.” Tony gestured widely.

Steve looked. “It’s getting bigger.” 

“Exactly.” 

“We’re bait?” Steve looked at Tony. 

“I prefer to say we’re the entertainment, but you do you.” 

The three of them stared out the window for a minute in silence. 

“Wanna watch a movie?”


	6. Sleepwalking

The first time it happened, and Tony would like to point out that it was unreasonably creepy so of course there would be more times, Tony walked into the semi dark kitchen to a thing on the ceiling. He had yelped, called his suit and shouted at FRIDAY for lights. Peter had blinked groggily at him from where he was sticking to the ceiling with fingers and toes. “tOny.” He yawned. “What’re you doing in my room.” 

“Not your room, kid.” 

Peter started to wake up. “Oh, shoot.” He unstuck his feet, letting his legs dangle, then dropped to the floor mostly upright. 

“Want a snack?” 

“You don’t have to stay up for me.” Peter yawned again. 

“I’m not tired anymore.” 

The next time it happened was in one of the hallways. Tony had been wandering from the living room to his bedroom and there was an unfamiliar blob wedged in where the ceiling and wall met. 

“FRIDAY.” Tony hissed. She turned the lights on. And it was Peter again, stuck up there. “Peter.” Tony singsonged. “Peter. Peter, I will poke you. PETER.” 

Peter scrubbed a hand over his eyes then blinked at the world around him. “Not my room this time either?”

“Nope.” 

“Sorry.” 

“We’re going to talk about your sleep walking. It’s bad for my heart.” 

They had a heartfelt conversation about Peter sleepwalking as a child and how it sometimes still happened when he got stressed. Waking up stuck to walls or the ceiling was a new wrinkle. Tony offered to help Peter with the stress. Peter blushed. Tony shrugged and said that FRIDAY would now warn Tony, or anyone who might stumble across Peter sleeping, that he was there. Peter admitted that a few of the other Avengers had come across him at night. Tony thought it had been a good talk. 

Now he wasn’t so sure. FRIDAY had quietly chimed in his ear until he groaned, flopped over and opened his eyes. He sucked in a panicked breath before he realized it was Peter on the ceiling above his bed like some sort of demon. A very pretty demon. There was a name for that, Tony thought, succubus? Incubus? He shook himself, no, bad thoughts. 

Tony grabbed a bit of clutter from his night stand and threw it at Peter’s stomach. 

Peter snuffled, blinked, then his eyes went wide. “Sorry, sorry.” He started to scramble crabwise across the ceiling toward the door. 

“Hey, stop.” 

Peter peeked under his shoulder at Tony. 

“You’re welcome to sleep here. Just not on the ceiling.” Tony told him. 

“Oh. um. Really?” 

Tony patted the bed beside. 

Peter scuttled across the ceiling, down the wall to the headboard and down on to the bed. 

“Kid, don’t take this the wrong way. But that was unreasonably creepy.” Tony smiled. 

Peter blushed again. “We could always hide under the covers.” 

Tony grabbed his comforter and pulled it over them both.


	7. Infinity Fix-it

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little silly fix-it for Endgame

“How do you ACCIDENTALLY become the leader of a ghost army?” Peter asked after he had hugged the stuffing out of Tony. That hugging had taken long enough that Tony’s personal guard had started looking at Tony questioningly. Even after the hug Peter wasn’t letting Tony go. He had grabbed Tony’s hand and kept their forearms pressed together for the walk to Tony’s tent. When they got inside the tent Tony went to sit down with Peter falling to sit in his lap. 

“I don’t know, long story.” 

Peter snorted. “I’m not going anywhere.” 

Tony ran a hand along Peter’s thigh to make sure he was settled. “The infinity stones are … honestly, a mind fuck. They’re smaller than the smallest particular. Beyond anything Pym has ever dreamed off. They’re also larger than planets. Super massive black holes are just a pin prick to them.” 

“At those scales, death isn’t really a reality. The stones understand organic structures and processes.” Tony flexed his hand in remembered pain. “They understand combustion and fusion.”   
Peter found a bit more stuffing to squeeze. “But when you have the power to rewind time and rewrite reality those processes don’t have the same meaning.” 

“So you’re not dead?” 

“I was.” Tony breathed. “I think. The stones told me I was stopped, for a while. They set me to absolute zero, figuring out what to do with me.”   
Peter shivered in his lap. 

“Then they … fucked with my timeline, I guess… They rewound me but that started unraveling the timeline in a way that blue didn’t like, so they unwound me back but yellow wasn’t happy with that either. After a while they shunted me off into a side reality.” 

“And there was just an army of millions just lying around?” 

Tony laughed. “Yeah. I’m not the first person the stones have had problems with.” 

Peter cocked his head. “What?” 

“The stones understand the smallest pieces of existence, and the largest complexity of time. I think that humans, any thinking being, exists in a gray area, a liminal space for them. Not big enough, and not small enough to really wrap their infinite brains around.” 

“I thought they were all powerful.”

“They are. They just…” Tony sighed. It was hard to put into words. “They understand how synapse fire, and all the chemical reactions in the brain.”   
Tony paused. “I think, they don’t judge the way we do. When I say that blue didn’t like it, it’s not really that. Blue projected that unraveling and re-raveling the timeline would destabilize the function of calcium across the spectrum of light.”

Peter shifted. “You know that’s nonsense, what you just said.” 

“Yeah, but Blue was sure.” 

“So they tossed you into another reality?” 

“More like a pocket of reality attached to the side of our multi-verse.” 

“With all the other people that don’t make sense to them?” 

“Yep.” 

“Including an eighty story tall crocodile beast?”

“That’s Larry by the way.” 

Peter buried his head in Tony’s shoulder and laughed.


	8. Movies with Peter

“Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Peter’s Classic Movies.” Peter rattled off the intro with practiced eased. “Tonight we have a great guest for our watch-a-long, a man who needs no introduction.” Peter kept the cadence up to the end of the line then shut his mouth. He knew the camera had cut over to the man sitting next to him. 

The man grinned. “You’re not going to even…” 

“Nope.” Peter popped the P. “As you’ve said, we know who you are.” 

The man, Tony Stark, laughed. “You should.” 

“So, if you don’t know, we’ll spin a couple dials, turn a couple knobs and the movie machine will tell us what we’re watching. Are you ready to find out?” 

“Let’s get this party started.” 

Peter glanced at the screen that showed the animated overlay. “First the wheel of time.” The spinner wheel popped up on screen and started spinning, fast enough to be exciting and slow enough to make out decades in each section of the wheel. 

He looked back at Tony. “Say when.” 

Tony waited a few seconds drawing it out. “When.” 

The wheel stopped in the 50s. “Awesome, there are so many classics from the 50s. Next the genre buttons.” Another animation popped up this time, a panel of buttons all unlabeled. 

Tony poked his finger at the animation pretending to hit a button. The screen above the buttons flashed Sci-Fi.

Peter grinned, this was going to be amazing. “Alright, we have Sci-Fi from the 1950s, the birth of the genre. One more setting to go. The saturation slider.” 

Tony drug his finger back and forth over the slider a few times before settling toward the lighter end of the spectrum.

“Great, so now it’s time to ask the movie machine what to watch. Are you ready to pull the lever?” 

Peter put his hand on the big lever, one of the few real props on the set. Tony placed his hand over Peter’s. It could have been casual except for Tony rubbing his thumb along the back of Peter’s hand in a caress. Peter looked up at Tony and blushed at the man’s bedroom eyes. 

“Pull.” The wobbly chittering sound effect went off and Peter looked to the screen to see what movie had been selected. 

“Plan 9 from Outer Space.” He said to the camera. He turned to Tony. “Ever seen it?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I knew more about movies I could write a story were they use movies as metaphors for their love. Oh well.


	9. Superior

Peter stood in line with the other students as the teacher, Ms. Knightly, walked up and down the line looking them over. The blazer of his school uniform was loose in the shoulders but it was cleaned and pressed. May had insisted that Peter style his hair too and sent him off with a quick hug. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

Peter wasn’t planning on it. Ms. Knightly reached the end of the line, turned on her heel and faced the line of students. 

“Now…” She drew out the word. “You all need to understand what an amazing opportunity Superior is giving you, giving us, today.” Her eyes slid up and down the row passing over Peter. “He has asked for the best and brightest to come and visit Stark Tower. He wants to see who the next generation of scientists are.” Her eyes paused on Mimi Morris. “He has told us he’s interested in mentoring young talent.” She looked at Andre Fitzgerald. “You have been chosen out of the whole school as the most promising students we have.” Ms. Knightly paused to draw in a deep breath. “Do not fuck this up. If you can’t impress him,” she looked at Peter. “then keep your head down and make sure he doesn’t notice you.” 

There was a murmur of agreement. Peter wanted to roll his eyes. Everyone of them was going to try to get Superior’s attention. In the week since the students heard about this field trip, Peter had overheard at least four of the students around around him plans’ to accidentally impress Superior with their knowledge. Peter felt like he deserved a little credit for not discussing his own plans at school where everyone could hear. No when Peter heard about the field trip he had dragged MJ and Ned back to his apartment and talked about his plan behind closed doors like a respectful person.

Not that his plan was much of a plan. There were too many unknowns for him to come up with a set of steps. MJ had given him a pep talk all about recognizing opportunities and improvising. Ned had told him not to accidentally on purpose trip over Superior. Or to actually accidentally trip over him. After talking about the odds of being able to even say two words to the de facto leader of the country Ned had gone to Peter’s shelves and found his Lego model of Avengers’ Ascension and pulled the mini figure of Superior Iron-Man out. 

“Here. This is probably as close as we’ll ever get, but you can say you held superior in your hand.” 

Peter had the little figure in his pocket now and was worrying his thumb over the hard plastic lines. Without taking it out he flipped the little face plate up knowing that the smirking face of Superior was looking at him. 

“Alright everyone. Time to get on the bus. We’ll be going over more ground rules on the way over. And Eugene. Tuck in your shirt.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I learned while writing this that I can't spell Suprior - Surpior - Supirior - Superior right, ever. Thank you spell check.


End file.
